Posts Tagged Expectations

Understand your company’s value chain. A simple but profound lesson that has helped me throughout my career is understanding my company’s value chain. Simply put, no matter what your position, you need to understand how your employer ultimately makes money. When we think of companies, most of us think of their end-product—a Chick-fil-A sandwich, an H&M T-shirt, an Amazon everything! The “value chain” is the chain of value-adding activities that bring the product or service to the customer. As a young crewperson at McDonald’s, I observed the various steps prior to handing that delicious breakfast sandwich to the customer. Days

I recently watched my daughter Mollie walk across the stage with her business degree diploma from Samford University. It was an exceedingly proud moment, and it reminded me about my journey from being a new college graduate to making partner with Ernst & Young (EY) in a relatively short ten-year period of time. I found myself compiling a mental list of things that contributed to my success. While having an accounting degree with a high GPA and passing the CPA exam were viewed as gating criteria for a Big 4 firm like EY, I was fixated on the things that